[PLing] Talk by Jelena Živojinović on March 21, 13:15 CET

[Madeleine Butschety]

Dear colleagues, 

we cordially invite you to a talk by Jelena Živojinović (University of Udine & University of Verona) as part of the Jezik & Linguistics Colloquia series. Her talk entitled "The nature of the Torlak perfect vs. past" (joint work with Natalia Jardón, Central European University) will take place on Thursday, March 21, at 13:15 CET at lecture room P5 at the University of Nova Gorica, and online. The abstract of the talk can be found below. 

To attend via Zoom, please use the following link: [ https://ungsi.zoom.us/j/64269808151?pwd=dSs2Z1RENk5HcHpmWWZFUjRUT3p0QT09 | https://ungsi.zoom.us/j/64269808151?pwd=dSs2Z1RENk5HcHpmWWZFUjRUT3p0QT09 ] 

We hope to see many of you there! 

Best, 
Madeleine Butschety, on behalf of the Center for Cognitive Science of Language 

>>JELENA ŽIVOJINOVIĆ 
"The nature of the Torlak perfect vs. past" 

The debate surrounding the distinction between past and perfect tenses has persisted for decades. Central to this discourse is the perfect-as-state hypothesis (Moens 1987, Parsons 1990, Kamp & Reyle 1993, Mittwoch 2008), which posits that the meaning of the perfect is the assertion of a state in relation to a previous event. In this study, we provide a comprehensive analysis of the empirical distribution of the past and perfect tenses in Torlak, an understudied South Slavic variety, contrasting it with the Standard BCMS system. We aim to address two fundamental questions: 1) What semantic nuances does the perfect convey in Torlak compared to BCMS? 2) Is the Torlak perfect tight to a more complex semantics, as shown crosslinguistically? By examining these questions, we shed light on the intricate interplay between semantics and morphosyntax in tense marking, offering insights into the underlying structure and functional dynamics of tense in Torlak and its relation to the broader South Slavic linguistic landscape. 

References 
Kamp, H. & U. Reyle. 1993. From discourse to logic: An introduction to model-theoretic semantics of natural language, formal logic, and discourse representation theory. Kluwer. 
Mittwoch, A. 2008. The English resultative perfect and its relationship to the experiential perfect and the simple past tense. Linguistics and Philosophy, 31, 323-351. 
Moens, M. 1987. Tense, aspect and temporal reference. PhD Thesis. University of Edinburgh. 
Parsons, T. 1990. Events in the Semantics of English. MIT Press. 

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